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Entering the world’s most-visited art institution in the middle of the day, taking eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into the city traffic on simple scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, executed for international notoriety and subsequent movie adaptations.

Experts who observe patterns in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s heist at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the latest in a string of quick-hit thefts focused more on the monetary worth of precious stones or materials than the artifacts’ significance, perpetuating a pattern that has appeared over the last decade in Europe, Britain and the US. The venue, they suggest, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“One might wonder why thieves who want to take expensive jewellery are entering a globally renowned museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” stated Christopher A Marinello. “The answer is simple: it’s because nowadays a high-end boutique is more secure.”

A spate of aggressive jewellery shop thefts indicate that many stores have strengthened their protection in recent years, with armed guards on their locations and wares no longer kept on display overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look more exposed, in part because of the in-built reason of being accessible institutions in older structures, and partly the financial situation in many developed nations.

“After the pandemic, governments across the world have cut back on police and the arts funding,” noted Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it shows how at risk our institutions have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the objects – featuring necklaces made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, the tiara of a historical figure containing thousands of diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once owned by a royal that the robbers left by the street on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the historical theft of the famous painting from the same museum, performed by the Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia.

More relevant comparisons may be the recent theft of jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over €113m, the taking of a £4.75m gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the same year, the recent robbery of a valuable item from a European museum or even a series of robberies of sports memorabilia from US mining museums.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” said Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as quickly as possible.”

If the items were to remain intact, specialists say, the thieves would struggle to find a buyer. “It's impossible to sell something as immediately identifiable as the museum's gems on the legal marketplace”, said Lynda Albertson of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, particularly given the cultural authorities has published photos of the items. Even a private collector or an auction house would want to see documentation establishing proper ownership before touching such remarkable pieces.”

In the previous years, museums were often reluctant to announce publicly about the disappearance of famous art pieces and would stay silent out of embarrassment. These days, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the storage and selling of stolen art is dangerous for any lawbreaker.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to remain intact or it becomes worthless, and you have to devise a scheme to keep it in hiding, perhaps by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the danger of an accomplice informing authorities to cash in a ransom.”

For similar reasons, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the robbery had been ordered. “Stolen to order is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the newspapers. If you buy this, if you get caught, you go to jail. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot leave it to your children.”

Modifying taken items by melting down or reshaping does lower the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because modern methods give stones a larger and lighter surface area, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a concealment.

Importantly, however, dismantling or re-cutting removes the evidence of the crime. “I suspect that the robbers will try to bring the stolen goods to places with gem knowledge like Israel, India or even as close as Antwerp, and locate an expert to cut out the stones,” said Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already raised questions about security measures at the museum, with a unauthorized official review expected to be released next month criticising “considerable” and “ongoing” slow progress in updating systems and noting that surveillance were missing in many rooms. But security experts say showing valuable objects in historic buildings with a constant flow of guests comes with risks that are impossible to eliminate completely.

“Older structures are much harder to secure,” explained Erin Thompson. “They often have large accessible windows that makes it easy for criminals to get away, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you are unable to install them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid protective measures for buildings should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, noted a security advisor. “There should be multiple levels to repel attackers.”

Modern buildings are equipped with state-of-the-art external CCTV cameras or integrated vibration sensors that alert about a broken glass in real time, but old museums may be hesitant to alter their exteriors. Laser scanners can be difficult to fit to stuccoed ceilings. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the daytime as hordes of visitors walk through a museum.

The timing of the Louvre raid, which took place between morning hours local time, was common of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “There’s a good reason why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. It’s often when guards change their shifts and before the museum is full of visitors who effectively act as extra protection.”

Technological progress may have introduced new gadgets that can notify more quickly and efficiently, but it has also provided thieves new tools with which to circumvent protections. In the city, the thieves accessed the museum’s upper level with a vehicle-mounted ladder and breached a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the discussion in the country about the historic structure had primarily centered on crowd control in recent years, and not as much on security.

The museum has an on-site brigade of about fifty permanent emergency personnel, but their purpose is mostly to safeguard the artworks from fires and water damage. “There is no quick reaction team,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the safety of the Louvre all comes down to political will and money, and currently the nation lacks sufficient money.”